The Painting

I was 10 when we moved to Redlands.  A few years after the second war my parents built a house on property my father had bought before the war.  Our house in San Bernardino had grown too snug for four growing children.

I first remember the painting over the mantelpiece in the new house.  Our family took a trip to Wyoming; I think the painter gave it to my father then.   The painter was a friend of my father’s – another early skier and Sierra Club member.

The painting had nice enough colors, but the Sierra Nevada mountain was young, rough and jagged.  The San Bernardino mountains viewed from large north living room window were as young, and almost as high, but had more graceful curves and ever changing light and shadows that gave them mystery and mood.  For me there was no contest.  I spent hours of my life in the front yard and in the living room looking at our mountains.  The painting was just another piece of furniture, seen but not perceived.

My father died of a heart attack while walking with friends in his beloved San Bernardino Mountains.  Mother stayed in the Redlands house for a few years, then sold the house and moved to a small condominium in the town below.

I was approaching 40 and nine months pregnant with our second daughter.  My siblings traveled to the old house and helped mother sort things-to-keep from things-to-disperse.  I just gave telephonic support from Washington State.

Eventually large packages came from the old house with a number of things I didn’t really need, including the painting.  In the Surr family siblings who don’t help get big surprises.  I had resumed oil painting at the time and one more painting was low on my list of wants.

Ox and I  moved our family from Washington State to Korea and put almost everything we owned into storage, including the mountain painting.  When we came to Crozet, near Charlottesville, we rented a furnished house for a year while we decided where to settle.  When we bought the house we live in now, we got our things from storage.  While without our lares and penates we had accumulated more stuff; we had to have a large sale to be able to move around in the new house.

The painting, far from having the place of honor it deserved, got hung in the dusty basement.  My own paintings, of lesser merit perhaps, hung everywhere that pictures from Ox’s family didn’t. but were mostly stacked three deep against the walls of the pig room.

We had moved at least every three years during our earlier married life.  Each move sifted out things we didn’t want to take to our next place.  We have lived in this house for almost 35 years with no sifting process.  I nag poor Ox to get rid of clutter; Ox’s mote is so much more obvious than my beam.  I have finally realized that I alone had so much junk that two places couldn’t contain it.

I never before considered finding a good home for the painting; my father had loved it.  I now realize that someone out there could love the painting and display it as it deserves.

An internet search on the painter’s name elicited some facts about him.  He was the official painter on Admiral Byrd’s Arctic expeditions.  He was, as I knew, a skier.  He was, as I didn’t know, a member of the Sierra Club.  I knew he had lived near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but he had painted in the high Sierras, and lived in Los Angeles as well.  The search also showed that several galleries sought paintings by the artist.

I took a poor snapshot with a flash and sent it off to one of them.  They gave me a rough estimate of what they would give for the painting.

An even better fate is in store for the painting. I wrote this blog about the painting, and my brother John wrote me that he'd enjoyed the blog piece and he'd always loved the painting.  His birthday is this month.   He and his wife will gladly display the painting in a worthy place.  He told me that the mountain was painted in the High Sierras from a place called Plummer's meadow.  This birthday present makes me very happy.